Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 44,461 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.

“No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror ... a dog destroys the service completely.”

“... letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps — who knows? — we might talk by the way.”

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

“... once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ”

“... every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.”

“... the intellect ... often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”

“Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science maybe; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ”

“... when a subject is highly controversial ... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies of the speaker. ”

“We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.”

“... women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.”

“... masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case [the woman writer's] not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?”

“Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.”

Virginia Woolf,

in Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Life As We Have Known It (1931)

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I go to my friends ... ”

“... reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once — hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head — all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response) ... ”

&quotHow Should One Read a Book?,&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush ...”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHow Should One Read a Book?,&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHow Should One Read a Book?,&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.'”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHow Should One Read a Book?&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHow Should One Read a Book?&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?”

“... scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed.”

“... if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion — the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.”

“What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotProfessions for Women,&quot The Death of the Moth (1942)

“... a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living — so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotProfessions for Women,&quot The Death of the Moth (1942)

“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotMiddlebrow,&quot The Death of the Moth (1942)

“... you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excellent in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. ... And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page ... Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotProfessions for Women,&quot The Death of the Moth (1942)

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the libarry lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”

Virginia Woolf,

The Death of the Moth (1942)

“... a party makes things either much more real or much less real ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotThe New Dress,&quot A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944)

“Theories then are dangerous things.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotThe Leaning Tower,&quot The Moment (1947)

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“ ... the profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait — whether to fish with worms or not ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotFishing,&quot The Moment (1947)

“... old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotRoyalty,&quot The Moment (1947)

“... travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotTo Spain,&quot The Moment (1947)

“There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotOn Being Ill,&quot The Moment (1947)

“As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotDavid Copperfield&quot (1925), The Moment (1947)

“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotReading,&quot The Captain's Death Bed (1950)

“The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotModern Letters,&quot The Captain's Death Bed (1950)

“... I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.”

Virginia Woolf,

1919, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.”

Virginia Woolf,

1919, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.”

Virginia Woolf,

1919, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.”

Virginia Woolf,

1920, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.”

Virginia Woolf,

1920, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.”

Virginia Woolf,

1920, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

1924, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. ”

Virginia Woolf,

1924, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

Virginia Woolf,

on writing, 1925, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.”

Virginia Woolf,

1925, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay one's hands on and say 'This is it'?”

Virginia Woolf,

1926, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.”

Virginia Woolf,

1928, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.”

Virginia Woolf,

1928, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. ”

Virginia Woolf,

1928, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

Virginia Woolf,

1928, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“... Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.”

Virginia Woolf,

1932, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person. ”

Virginia Woolf,

1937, in Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer's Diary (1953)

“I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. ”

“You can't think what vain beasts writers are — but Nessa will tell you. I don't think the artist is so much tempted that way, because all his or her work is done in the open, and is therefore always criticised, whereas a poor wretch of an author keeps all his thoughts in a dark attic in his own brain, and when they come out in print they look so shivering and naked. So for other people to like them is a great encouragement.”

“... I haven't said anything very much, or given you any notion of the terrific high waves, and the infernal deep gulfs, on which I mount and toss in a few days. So does everyone. Up and down we go, violently, incessantly ... ”

“As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object — It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me — But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.”

“I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!”

“You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?”

“... like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotA Sketch of the Past&quot (1940), Moments of Being (1976)

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotA Sketch of the Past&quot (1940), Moments of Being (1976)

“In certain favorable moods, memories — what one has forgotten — come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them?”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotA Sketch of the Past&quot (1940), Moments of Being (1976)

“One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”

Virginia Woolf,

in Anne O. Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1 (1978)

“One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats — and one always secretes too much jelly.”

“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.”

“Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.”

Virginia Woolf,

1924, in Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (2000)

“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.”

Virginia Woolf,

1926, in Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (2000)

“[On her 'dumb rage' on the war and being] fought for by young people whom one wants to see making love. ”

Virginia Woolf,

1939, in Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (2000)

“Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotPoetry, Fiction, and the Future,&quot in David Hume, ed., Selected Essays (2008)

“You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind ... ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotPoetry, Fiction, and the Future,&quot in David Hume, ed., Selected Essays (2008)

“For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotStreet Haunting: A London Adventure,&quot in David Hume, ed., Selected Essays (2008)

“It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.”

Virginia Woolf

“To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall. ”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHours in a Library,&quot Granite and Rainbow (1958)

“I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.”

Virginia Woolf

“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”

Virginia Woolf,

The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1923-1928 (1975)

“The old hunger to know what the immortals thought has given place to a far more tolerant curiosity to know what our own generation is thinking ... And soon we develop another taste, unsatisfied by the great — not a valuable taste, perhaps, but certainly a very pleasant possession — the taste for bad books ... We know which authors can be trusted to produce yearly (for happily they are prolific) a [book] which affords us indescribable pleasure. We owe a great deal to bad books; indeed, we come to count their authors and their heroes among those figures who play so large a part in our silent life.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHours in a Library,&quot Granite and Rainbow (1958)

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotMontaigne,&quot The Common Reader (1925)

“Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death. ”

Virginia Woolf

“For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotThe New Biography,&quot Granite and Rainbow (1958)

“To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.”

Virginia Woolf,

&quotHow Should One Read a Book,&quot The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932)

“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.”

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings ... it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.”